We know that you’ve been waiting with bated breath, so we’ll end the suspense. Here are the winners of PRISM international’s 2015 Creative Non-Fiction contest, as chosen by judge Russell Wangersky.
Grand prize: “Ghostly Transmissions from John D. Rockefeller” by Danny Jacobs
1st Runner-Up:“Reconstructing” by Liza Porter
2nd Runner-Up:“How to Give a Passive-Aggressive Handjob” by Victoria Young
About the judging process, Russell Wangersky said, “I should say that all of the pieces I read gave me something: a magic turn of phrase, a thrum of description, a sense of awe at structure buried cleverly in art. But still, in the end I had to pick the three best pieces.”
About the winning pieces, Russell said, “Two of the pieces—winner ‘Ghostly Transmissions from John D. Rockefeller’ and first runner-up ‘Reconstructing’—have a delightful structural dissonance. Both involve the complicated interweaving of separate storylines into a cohesive structure, and that warp and weft makes them more than the sum of their parts. Second runner-up “How to Give a Passive Aggressive Handjob” has a more traditional structure, but a grasp of tone that is hard to achieve: self-deprecating without being self-pitying, a style that lets the reader understand the author can step out of the experience and observe the writer’s own life with a kind of clarity.”
You can read the rest of Russell’s essay, along with the three winning pieces, in our Spring issue 54.3. Congratulations to the winners!